Wanting to show a part of my city that goes unnoticed, I entered a national writing contest. The subject was already familiar to me: the alleys behind my parents' restaurant, where murals cover the walls of old houses and horses wander past structures no one photographs. I spent days there taking hundreds of pictures, waiting for a poem to arrive. What I found was that a place I had passed daily could still surprise me — that ordinary streets hold something worth naming, if someone bothers to look long enough. My mother suggested I write about the murals, and I settled on a single image: a painted sea meeting a painted sky. The poem was published, and the part that mattered most was not the book but the thought that others might now see what had always been there. I would have been glad regardless. Exploring my own city more deeply was reason enough.